How to create a DBContext as part of an existing transaction in Entity Framework Core

Question

I have product that already uses ADO.Net to access SQL Server and I'm using Entity Framework Core for some new functionality. The problem I'm having is I have some operations that must be done in a single transaction and the first few actions are implemented through ADO.Net and I need add an extra action using Entity Framework so I need to pass the transaction to the DBContext.

When I need to use an existing connection I can do:

var dbc = new MyDBContext(optionsBuilder.UseSqlServer(connection).Options)

Is there something similar where I pass in a transaction instead of a connection? Should I be doing this in a completely different way?

Answer 1

You can do something like this to create DbContext with your existing SqlTransaction. This worked for me. I do CRUD operations using both ADO.NET and using EF on the same transaction.

   //create connection and transaction do usual ADO.NET stuff

       SqlTransaction transaction = ... // existing transaction
        var existingConnection = transaction.Connection;
        var contextOwnsConnection = false;
       using (var db = new MyDbContext(existingConnection, contextOwnsConnection))
        {
           db.Database.UseTransaction(transaction);
            //do something with db
        }

        // optionally do usual ADO.NET stuff  ....

        transaction.Commit();